A Punch To The Face
by farewellblindgirl
Summary: Temperance Brennan remembers punching him at his own funeral.  She thinks it's time to do it again.


It sounded like a joke if you said it out loud: Dr. Temperance Brennan punched Sergeant Seeley Booth at his funeral.

_She laughs at that. Booth gives her an odd look, but she has no desire to explain herself right now. She's not sure why her current situation is causing her to replay the last decade of her life in her head. And just because he's looking at her expectantly doesn't mean she has to explain it all to the idiot.. She's not even really sure she wants to talk to him, ever again anyway._

Except that there wasn't anything really funny about it. Not for her. In the aftermath of the funeral, everyone rushed to create reasons for her actions, and the group seemed to settle on the idea that she had punched him because he had lied to her about his death. It was a convenient fiction, and she was perfectly willing to adopt it. Even if it was completely stupid.

Brennan understood the government's need for compartmentalization. She'd done work for the State Department examining mass graves, work that she couldn't legally talk about. Booth's undercover work was annoying, and his decision to communicate with her through Sweets even more so, but it was understandable. And it wasn't what made her mad.

What made her mad - what made her punch him - was that he'd managed to get himself shot in the first place. Even if he'd been treated and released from the hospital in a matter of hours, she still would have punched him.

It seemed like the least she could do after he'd destroyed her life.

It wasn't fair, really, what he'd done to her. He was supposed to be her protector, her friend. She looked to him now to help her build up the defenses that had been torn down through connecting with her father, her brother, with Angela... she thought that was why he created the line. It made sense, didn't it? If they created a boundary between them, she would be protected if anything were to happen to him.

Well, to borrow a phrase from Booth's vernacular, 'that was just crap.' He put himself in front of a bullet it for her, and it hadn't mattered a damn that there was a line between them. How could you make any claim of a line when you were willing to die for someone anyway?

Holding him, watching him lose consciousness - in that moment, she knew something that she had previously only suspected. She was in love with him. She would step in front of a bullet for him (which made more sense anyway - he was the one with a child and love and a cosmic sheet to balance); she would have shot Pam Noonen a hundred times for him - emptied the clip, reloaded, and fired again. She would do, quite literally, anything for him.

And he paid her back by going and dying.

Punching him had been deeply satisfying, but it hardly solved the problem. The problem, the real problem, was that she was in love with him, with no idea what to do about it. So, sitting at home, nursing a sore hand, she did the only thing she could. She attacked the problem analytically.

First off, she had no guarantee that what she felt was love - emotional definitions were always horribly ambiguous, and she had no past precedent to draw upon. Secondly, love was no guarantee of permanent happiness. It also didn't guarantee that he was, in turn, in love with her. It didn't guarantee that if he was in love with her, that he'd never hurt her. And finally, love didn't guarantee that she'd be able to overturn a lifetime of habits based on the simple premise that she would always be wholly alone.

It was easy to survive when you were impervious. When she didn't care or need the friendship, affection or approval of anyone, then no one could really hurt her. But now, she was pervious, which meant she had to figure out a new way to live.

So that's what she did.

In some ways, it could be said that she had started over from scratch. She removed the base axioms from her approach to life, and observationally began trying to induct new first principles. To an outside observer, she must have, at times, looked childish, but she reminded herself of the quote from Epictitus - "He who wishes to improve must be willing to be constantly thought foolish and stupid."

Though they never spoke of it, she noticed Booth changing too, after his 'death.' His anger seemed to fade away. He became quieter, in some ways, less aggressive. He would, at times, begin to act sillier around her. She became sillier too - and more aware of how she fit into the larger world. It was because of him that she started to connect more - to see how she related to animals and people and whole towns and maybe it was time to have a child?

_It is getting hard to think - to take this odd trip down memory lane. Given the circumstances, that seems to make sense. Booth continues to babble in her ear, but his voice has taken on an oddly aphasia-like quality. As if he's just making random noises, not words. Its not like she wants to talk to him right now anyway. _

She thought her plan was going well, which it was, until he, of course, ruined it again. Or maybe Sweets was to blame this time. Either way, she was not ready that night on the steps of the train station when he proposed they start a relationship. She wanted one, certainly, two years and countless changes hadn't changed what she felt for him. But that didn't mean she was ready.

So she went away.

When they got together, it would end eventually. She'd finally come to accept that it wouldn't end consciously on either of their parts, at least not hers and probably not his. But it would end, in either six months or 60 years, because one of them would die - of old age, of cancer or a car crash or to save the other's life. And that was fine. She knew that. But she had to practice being able to survive it first. You don't make life changing decisions without an exit strategy, not if you are Temperance Brennan. Maluku was her attempt to see if she could survive a life after him - without him.

He was the gambler, but she was the one that gambled that night. She was betting that he was just as mired in what was between them as she was, and that his 'moving on' was a convenient lie he was telling the both of them to lessen the sting. And it probably was a just a lie, a lie that became the truth when he met Hannah. That was why gambling was idiotic; you lost more than you won.

She was never mad at him for Hannah. Hannah was her mistake, not his.

_She wants to punch him again. She's sure he knows that, even though he is a completely useless idiot, because he's got his stupid 'sniper-sense' and it seems to be on full alert. Maybe she can just punch Angela instead, for lying to her._

She feels silly now, for how she associated with that surgeon. It just seems so... psychological... which will always annoy her. She understands that human motivation is ephemeral and often inscrutable. She takes offense, though, at the notion that psuedo-scientists, through mere observation, can attempt to define rules of human behaviour that are unverifiable through experiment. She studied psychological experiments in college - they seemed so... sloppy.

But the Doctor: she'd almost died that night, finding how the surgeon was killed, and while it didn't cause her to reevaluate her priorities (her priorities were quite clear), she did feel a need to share with Booth what she felt. She owed him some honesty. She hadn't said what she'd said expecting any sort of reciprocity. She just wanted to share. Booth had said sharing can make you less vulnerable.

But maybe it had proved to be a turning point for them anyway, or maybe the turning point was … the elevator? Or maybe it was just another step in a long line of steps that included tequila and Jasper and Brainy Smurf and Thai food and Sweet's book and fantasies about owning nightclubs and … hell... what was her point again?

_She's going to kill him - he did this to her, this not... thinking … good … ability... thing._

The punch led her to verify three things: prove that she loved him. Prove that she could reciprocate his love. Prove that she could survive its loss.

She loved him.

She showed them both, daily, that she loved him.

And now, she'd finally found a way for their love to survive the loss of one of them. It was just not the way she'd expected.

_Okay, so she hasn't fully achieved the last part, but she's really trying, and doesn't seem to be completely under her control anyway, but she'll accomplish it soon (soon being a relative term. It's been 40...70...12...something hours already)._

That's the real reason we have children, she thinks. So that love can survive our death. It's a sweet, gooey thought, and not one she'd have if she wasn't on lots of brain-tamping painkillers. Labor sucks.

"Okay Dr. Brennan, it's time. You'll need to push."

"It's time, Bones. Time to welcome a little Bones into the world."

She looks over at him and he's got this happy sweet look on his face.

"I just realized. I've actually punched you twice. I'm going to need to make it three times before this is over."

The doctor gives her an odd look, but Booth just chuckles. And then the final step begins and there is really no talking after that.


End file.
